


365 Days and a Cigarette Afterwards [Translation]

by SmilingNerdyCat



Series: some translations i guess [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, I mean a lot of angst, M/M, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23144023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmilingNerdyCat/pseuds/SmilingNerdyCat
Summary: The 17th of June 1996. Sirius Black fell in the battle of the Department of Mysteries. 365 days have past, but the pain of the loss does not have an expiration date. And Remus Lupin knows it.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: some translations i guess [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1663660
Kudos: 7





	365 Days and a Cigarette Afterwards [Translation]

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [365 días y un cigarro después](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19255345) by [sgaywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sgaywalker/pseuds/sgaywalker). 



> hello everyone! this is my first translation that i've posted. i'm kind of really nervous but i love this fic so much, so i'm just gonna post it on impulse and then overthink it later.
> 
> hope you like it!

Three-hundred and sixty five days have passed. Not an hour, not a minute, not a second more or less. That 17th of June 1996, Remus Lupin doesn’t even need a watch to tell him the exact time that it all happened. There is something inside of him that says it without magic or muggle technology. It makes him stop--a year later--in front of a group of muggle girls doing aerial silks near Big Ben. Raising their arms, the cotton cloth flies elegantly above their heads and Remus soon is caught in a spell without magic, and he can not stop looking, the wandering movement of the cloth seems to whisper to him, laugh at him. 

“Pay attention,” it says with more cruelty than Remus can bear, “and remember. Remember what has been lost.”

The white of the cotton flashes in the sun, but he imagines them to be much darker and he sees the ripples that it draws in the air in slow motion. The animated chatter of the tourists becomes a murmuring of spirits and the jangling of bells of the dancing girls reminds him of the sound of his own desperate lunges in the Department of mysteries. He closes his eyes and is there once again. Someone yells in his memory, and Remus knows that it’s Harry, but he has always believed that that piercing shriek is also from his heart, fatally wounded. He is bleeding and crying and broken in thousands of pieces when he sees Sirius’s eyes disappear behind the veil. His gray gaze is the final thing Remus sees of him, and in this look, the resignation of having arrived at the end, under the effect of Lestrange’s curse.

Remus grabs Harry tightly while the boy cries out and neither of them said it in that fateful moment, but they both knew that Remus was not only stopping Harry from running after Sirius but also holding on to Harry, as if he were a life vest in a raging sea, as if he were the final tree that a hurricane has yet to uproot. Without Harry, he would have plunged into that veil filled with the peace of mind that Sirius was waiting for him behind it with bright eyes and that rowdy smile that had always come before that thundering laugh.

Big Ben’s hourly ringing forces him to open his eyes and the Department of Mysteries fades into his mind. The dancing girls continue with their Aerial silks and a circle of tourists groups around them, throwing money and taking photos. None of them seem to notice Remus’s presence--his sad face full of scars or his old and worn clothes--and maybe it’s because he’s far away from there. Ever since Sirius died, Remus has always seemed to be apart from everything and everyone, as if he had crossed into the veil as well, and he was with Sirius in some unattainable place.  
Big Ben continues to sound, and with the final ring Remus’s heart contracts. “It was just at this time, in this precise instant. 365 days ago,” he thinks, certain of it, and rubs at his arms to try to stave off the cold that has burrowed into the marrow of his bones and extended rapidly throughout his body, like the silver light of the full moon.

He sighs and continues his stroll with numb toes. He walks with a slowness confused with calm that is nothing but the vicious melancholy that consumes him, and despite the pain, he examines the facade of Number 12 Grimmauld Place. He sits in the square just in front and looks at it without daring to enter. He takes a creased cigarette from his pants pocket, lights it tactfully with his wand and smokes it slowly with eyes lost in the window to Sirius’s room.

For a few months now he’s been taking poppy to avoid the nightmares, but in that moment Remus knows that there is not a sleeping potion strong enough to stop him from dreaming of Sirius that night, none that could spare him from waking up at dawn in sweaty sheets from the pain of the loss, from the agony of seeing him disappear behind that veil that he has come to hate even more than himself. Before he always wanted to be able to rip out the wolf hidden beneath his skin, as if it were a splinter stuck in his finger, but now he thinks about being able to do the same with the sadness that dulls his other emotions and reaches everything, leaving him with the feeling that the veil did not only take Sirius but also a large part of his soul.  
He takes another drag of his cigarette, a deep one, as if the tang of the tobacco and the hot ash could warm the hidden parts of his insides that have been frozen since Sirius’s death. The smoke covered the view of the house of the Blacks when he lets it escape through his half-open lips, and for an instant he seemed to see a trim figure in the window to Sirius’s room. A slender figure with dark hair and tormented eyes. He gets up with his heart beating rapidly against his ribs, but when the smoke diapates from it all, the figure does the same, and Remus curses his sick imagination and that part of his mind that allowed him to yearn for impossible things. As if he were coming back. As if he had never left.

As if that room weren’t empty forever.

The cigarette escapes his trembling fingers and Remus watches it fall without trying to stop it. When it strikes the ground, it doesn’t make a sound, but to him it seems like a blow that contains the strength and intensity of teenage love and many lost years. And because of that he turns around and runs without looking back because that cigarette is everything that won’t come back. He would like to crush it and do away with everything quickly and thoroughly but there’s something--he doesn’t know what--that stops him and that makes his feet heavy as lead when he tries to move them. So he runs away. Because only fleeing and fleeing and fleeing can ward off everything and it takes the weight off his feet enough to escape that profound and searing pain that has taken over him and that threatens to never leave at all.

His steps echo for a moment through the deserted street before they fade, swallowed by the traffic. Above the damp cobblestone and below the towering shadow of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, the cigarette is consumed little by little between plumes of smoke. Soon it’s no more than a little pile of ash and the remains of a yellowish filter and already no one can say if the cigarette was light or dark or tell the brand. A gust of air carries the ash away, and it forces the filter into a nearby sewer, and so the cigarette disappears completely, destroyed by its own flame before anyone is able to taste it.

**Author's Note:**

> I had some trouble with the beginning of the seventh paragraph at this sentence:  
> He walks with a slowness confused with calm that is nothing but the vicious melancholy that consumes him, and despite the pain, he examines the facade of Number 12 Grimmauld Place.
> 
> The original was  
> Camina con una lentitud que se confunde con calma pero que no es otra cosa que una melancolía atroz que le consume, y cuando quiere darse cuenta está contemplando la fachada del número doce de Grimmauld Place.
> 
> I changed it a lot to try to convey that like it was painful to look at the house but that he wanted to, but I think that it was kind of lost there. If anyone has any suggestions to phrase it better, I'd love to hear it!


End file.
